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New gadget could boost sports ratings

A change in how television ratings are gathered may well confirm a long-held belief in sports marketing circles: Live sports is the biggest attraction on all of TV.

By Chris YoungSports columnist

Fri., Sept. 11, 2009

It's early in the game, but a change in how television ratings are gathered may well confirm a long-held belief in sports marketing circles: Live sports is the biggest attraction on all of TV.

But while Labour Day weekend ratings estimates showed eye-popping spikes over last year's numbers for sports properties such as the CFL, NASCAR and U.S. Open tennis, no one at the leagues or networks are popping champagne corks and dreaming of fat rights fees. Rather, it's the introduction of the Personal People Meter (PPM) to measure audience size that is the story – at least, for now.

The PPM is a pager-sized device that travels with the person measuring their viewing habits to include out-of-home broadcasts, replacing the housebound TV set-top People Meter, which replaced written diaries in the late 1990s. According to BBM Canada, the industry-funded ratings firm, 9,000 PPMs across the country began passively recording viewership on Aug. 31, via an inaudible electronic signature embedded in TV and radio broadcasts.

"Everybody in this industry has always assumed that ratings were higher than they seemed – there just wasn't any way of measuring that kind of out-of-home viewership (at sports bars, in groups, and other people's homes)," said Phil King, president of CFL rights-holder TSN. "It certainly appears that live sports will benefit."

Sunday's Winnipeg-Saskatchewan CFL broadcast, for example, drew an audience estimated at 982,000. Monday's Eskimos-Stampeders tilt checked in at 979,000 and the Argos-Ticats' Labour Day Classic pulled in 844,000 – all up substantially from a year ago.

Last week's top-rated show in Canada, Big Brother, drew an audience of 1.81 million, up about 50 per cent from its pre-PPM number – that Bombers-Roughriders broadcast was more than double last year's corresponding game, and trailed only the CTV Evening News in Sunday's ratings.

One-off sports events known as "event viewing" in the trade – the Grey Cup, the Super Bowl, the Stanley Cup final and world junior tournament – have always drawn huge, chart-topping audiences, and the early PPM numbers show increases in general, especially among young viewers. But some are predicting that Hockey Night in Canada may well end up as the nation's No. 1 show overall. HNIC's 7 p.m. broadcast averaged 1.233 million last season, but didn't crack the weekly top 10 until the playoffs arrive.

Will this upsurge in sports audience be accompanied by a rise in the advertising rates and rights fees associated with those broadcasts? Perhaps, but it probably won't be a huge change, and certainly won't come for some time.

"I think that's nonsense. It's just a change in currency, and all it means is that it's capturing what the market actually is," said Sunni Boot, president of Zenith Optimedia, which buys advertising time for clients. "Is it a perfect system? No. But it's the most accurate measure we've ever had in this country."

There will be winners and losers, though, in the scramble for a piece of Canada's $9 billion advertising pie, with upwards of $3 billion of that total going to TV. The shift from written diaries to People Meters in 1998 resulted in a drop for TV news, documentaries and prime-time shows, and a rise in daytime and late-night TV, and sitcoms. And in TV, size matters.

"Time will tell of course, but our partners at TSN believe this new system will be more accurate when it comes to capturing a truer picture of the large number of people watching our games," CFL spokesmen Matt Maychak said. "After all, watching sports is a very social thing. So this could be very positive for our business.

"Television ratings are one of the measures people consider when gauging the strength of your brand in the marketplace, whether they're sponsors, corporate partners or everyday fans. ... But we'll have to wait and see what the overall impact is, over time."

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